My housemates and I have used MythTV for most of our TV access for somewhere around 2 years now. During that period of time, MythTV presented us with an extremely large number of failures. We used to experience a really horrible bug where the video would freeze (this correlated well with poor DVB signal strength), and so we configured “Ctrl-Alt-x” to kill the frontend process and start it again. This got used frequently. However, more recently we had an even more painful bug, where the frontend would always quit after playing less than a minute of video. This made it impossible to watch anything.

So, I sat down one evening a few weeks ago and bodged together “MythFace”, a MythTV client designed to do one thing: let you watch MythTV’s recordings.

As you can see, the interface is the pinnacle of usability and fits in well with many GNOME applications that have no configuration options. When you click “play”, the selected recording is played using mplayer. MythFace relies on the MythTV recordings directory being mounted at /mnt/video (we use an NFS export), and uses the GMyth library to grab the listings.

We’ve been using this interface since I wrote it and I don’t think we’ve had any issues with it. I think a major bonus of MythFace over MythTV is that it’s much faster to interact with due to the absence of a skinned interface.

Source is available on Gitorious:

git clone git://gitorious.org/mythface/mainline.git

Tags: bodge, mythface, mythtv

I wanted to always be able to shell to a machine within the Uni network. The Uni network has a firewall that stops incoming requests to most machines. There’s a machine that all undergrads can shell to, which I normally use netcat combined with the ssh ProxyCommand setting. However, it’s a little silly to divert all traffic through another machine when I’m in the network. So, meet the new script I use in the ProxyCommand:

#!/bin/bash
HOST=$1

got=`ifconfig eth1 | egrep -o "inet addr:152.78.[0-9]{1,3}\\.[0-9]{1,3}"`
got+=`ifconfig eth0 | egrep -o "inet addr:152.78.[0-9]{1,3}\\.[0-9]{1,3}"`

if [[ "$got" == "" ]]
then
    ssh uglogin.ecs.soton.ac.uk nc $HOST 22
else
    nc $HOST 22
fi

Tags: linux, ssh

Justyn alerted me to the existence of this LinuxDevices article about the Beagle Board. This platform looks like a good candidate for the robot controller for Student Robotics 2010! If it stays at $150 that is.

Tags: electronics, student robotics